Pop music has always had its flip side

To see why Sir Elton’s complaints about vapid new acts don’t stack up, just look at Lou Reed

Modern pop music is processed, “packaged crap”, says Sir Elton John. How fitting that he should have said it – at a private dinner at the Royal Academy of Music – in the week of the death of seemingly the least processed, packaged pop star of them all: cantankerous, difficult, wilfully obnoxious, painfully avant garde Lou Reed.

Not, of course, that Reed would ever have called himself a pop star. He built most of his career striving to avoid popularity, first by rejecting the dreamy, mellow psychedelia of late Sixties America in favour of the raw, visceral sound of the Velvet Underground; then later by insulting his fans with contemptuously short sets and making records such as Metal Machine Music, a wall of relentless, “ear-wrecking, electronic sludge” reckoned by some to be the worst rock ’n’ roll album of all time.

Though it’s unlikely that Reed would ever have been caught agreeing publicly with an artiste as pleasantly accessible as Sir Elton, he would no doubt have shared the sentiment. “Everything’s too flawless now. Everything’s Autotuned, there’s no trace of humanity,” Sir Elton told his audience. “Anyone can make a record in their living room or their bedroom and it can be a very good record but they don’t have the skill to go and play it live, to hone skills.”

It all sounds very plausible: yes, Autotune – the technology that makes even rubbish singers sound great – really has made pop sound too easy, too pristine; yes, thanks to Pop Idol and The X Factor, it really does seem as if all the authenticity has vanished from popular music, replaced by the manufactured, the bland and the trite.

But was there ever really a golden age of pop when everything was so much more deep and soulful and meaningful than it is today? Consider, for example, that in 1971 – when Lou Reed had recently left the Velvet Underground and was about to reinvent himself with Transformer – a Scottish band called Middle of the Road had a hugely successful number one hit with Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep. “Where’s your momma gone?/ (Where’s your momma gone?)” it went, before inquiring about the whereabouts of “poppa”, and then breaking into the chorus: “Ooh wee chirpy chirpy cheep cheep/Chirpy chirpy cheep cheep chirp.”

The song is very catchy – which is why it sold more records, 10 million, than Lou Reed probably did in his entire career. But it would be stretching it to suggest that this was a work of any greater depth or sophistication than that of young whippersnappers such as One Direction or Bruno Mars. However things may look through Sir Elton’s rose-tinted spectacles, the fact is that there has always been a strand to popular music which is kitsch, ersatz, vapid and manufactured. And in any case, who is to say that these are necessarily bad things?

I certainly wouldn’t. If we were snootily to reject all music that was processed and manufactured, then it would mean missing out on some of the most enjoyable moments in pop history: there’d be no Monkees (who could barely play their instruments) singing Daydream Believer; there’d be no Phil Spector Wall of Sound or Buggles doing Video Killed the Radio Star; no Britney Spears Blackout album; hardly any great hip hop or dance at all, because it’s almost all producer-driven.

Whenever you listen to musicians of a certain age, they’ll always tell you how much better and more real everything was in the old days. This is only natural – because that’s when they were younger, with more energy and more dexterous fingers and a greater vocal range than they can manage today. And it’s also because if there’s one thing that obsesses them above all else, it’s authenticity: a quality, of course, that was abundant in the days when they were playing to two men and a dog in toilet venues, but which no longer applies when you’re filling stadiums.

What the likes of Sir Elton also forget when they’re railing against processed pop is that they’re working in an entertainment business where everything is manufactured and fake, even the stuff that purports not to be.

Lou Reed is an excellent example of this. In his early career, his mentor was that arch fabricator Andy Warhol, who taught Reed to become the thing he wanted to be – a rock star – by first pretending to be one. The short hair, the leather jackets, the amphetamines, the carefully contrived rudeness when giving interviews – these were every bit as much a construct as the paisley-shirted, floral-haired, peace-and-love hippy-dippiness wafting across from the other side of America.

There have always been these two strands to popular music: the easy and the difficult; the raw and the smooth; the real and the fake. But, really, they are just two sides of the same coin. Whether you’re the Byrds or the Beatles, the Velvets or the Sex Pistols, it’s all just showbusiness in the end.